Step 4: Use it !

Step 5: The Science behind it.

Now that you have made green plastic to your hearts content, you might be wondering just HOW its possible to make plastic from a potato? To find out w...

Step 4: Use it !

So by now you should have a glob of messy starch plastic resin that is ready to be molded, injected, shaped, and formed into anything you want. A major advantage to this plastic, besides the fact that it does not use petroleum, is that it is also 100% biodegradable! That means in the right conditions, it will decompose in months instead of thousands of years. Its time to get creative and figure out things we can use it for.Possibilities include:-Plates and dinnerware-Plastic bags-Cups-Bowls-Pens-And whatever else you can imagine...

a video showing a piece of colored plastic that is very flexible and strong (the tear in it is from drying)

I have been trying with this experiment but it is not working. Everytime I dry it in an oven for 2 hours at 50 degree Celsius, the results turn out to become sticky and soft after a few minutes. Can I know how to fix this problem? Thanks.

As a dye, I have used Easter eggs colorant :) It has worked perfectly well. The almost final product (my plastic cookies are still in the oven) I have obtained is transparent orange. It looks really nice :)

Hi Brandon I really liked this of making potato plastic... I tried to do it but I don't know what Im doing wrong because it doesn't look like yours.... I didn't use 100% Vegetable Liquid Glycerin I used normal Glycerin, was that the problem??? I also used an other type of starch. When I'm mixing it, it starts getting like gel but it never turns to plastic :( Do you know what I'm doing wrong?? help please.

depends on the environment its in, in a moist compost pile probably 2 weeks, a warm glass of water a week, and dry soil I'm guessing maybe a month or so. What Styrofoam are you talking about? Normal Styrofoam wont biodegrade fully for hundreds of years.

Hi Brandon, this is AWESOME. May I ask few questions? how transparent it is? Is the blueish plastic film the original "final look" without additional pigments? how does it react with temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius? and how fast does it decompose? I want to replace a broken plastic lamp cover from kitchen rangehood but sadly enough the piece in no longer available from the rangehood manufacturer so I now thinking about moulding some decent plastic at home. :-) I thank you in advance

Hello! This is very inventive as far as the whole green thing goes. I can so dig that. However, if I were to attempt this to create a mold for chocolate, how effectively would you say this is? More importantly, would you rate this appropriate for containing food or temperatures both warmer and colder than human skin or room temperature? If you think it's fine for food, I could try it for molds and tell you how it turns out. Keep rocking!

OK I finally added pictures and video of plastic samples, hope this shows a little what to expect... ( some of the samples are from when I was first perfecting the technique of getting it to dry evenly, those samples are the "raisin" ones)

Hi, I tried this over the weekend and it worked well; however, I'm trying to make presentation covers for a small architectural office and the amount of flexibility is a problem. You write in the science wrap-up that if you eliminate the glycerine that it would be hard and crack, what about if one were to reduce the amount of glycerine? I'm looking for it to cure a bit harder so that it will be usable as a really heavy cover stock weight sheet. Any advice? I'm going to try further refining, but any advice you have would be great. If I have some good results I'll write back again. Thanks for this project! Great stuff!

Yes the amount of glycerin determines the pliability and flexibility of the plastic, however the more flexible something is the less hard it becomes and vice versa (usually). So yes if you want it to be stiff, then add only a very small ammount of glycerin.

How strong, exactly, is this plastic? I mean, I know that it is fantastically biodegradable, not to mention safe for the environment, but if I were to use it as a substitution for other plastics, how would it compete?